I always used the little kitchen at meal-times for convenience’ sake, and one night I remained there reading until very late, the kitchen being lit only by one small lamp at my back. I had just closed my book—it was about one o’clock—and was summoning the effort required to take me bedwards, when I noticed a very slight movement of the iron latch upon the door leading into the back garden. My thoughts naturally flew to burglars. The locality was lonely, and no doubt my coming had been duly talked over in the village with all the exaggeration and surmise an out-of-the-way place is capable of.
I was, of course, considerably startled, and sat watching the latch slowly rise, evidently actuated by a very delicate and even pressure from without. The door itself was bolted at both top and bottom, and when the latch had risen clear of the hasp I fully expected to hear the bolts rattle as the person outside put his weight against the door to try it. But nothing of the sort happened; the latch, after remaining suspended for a moment, fell back again into place as slowly and evenly as it had risen.
Startled and puzzled as I was, I still held to my belief that this must be a timid attempt at robbery, and that, finding the back door locked, the intruder would try the front one also. Nor was I wrong, for I had scarcely slipped quietly into the sitting-room and taken up my position when the latch there began to rise in precisely the same manner. This door possessed only one bolt, and that at the bottom, so that the door, an old and ill-fitting one, would show the slightest pressure at once. But none was placed upon it, and the latch fell into place as evenly and noiselessly as before. By this time I must confess to being slightly scared, and when a chair banged heavily on the floor and a loud shout of “Who’s that?” brought no sound of a retreating shuffle on the cobble-stones outside, I had to summon all my remaining courage to unbar and fling open the door. Not a soul or a sound met me as I stepped outside. The night was a light one in early September, so that a retreating figure could have been followed by the eye for twenty or thirty yards. After a careful look round the garden I went to bed nonplussed at the weirdness of the whole affair.
The following day brought another intruder—a material one this time. I found that during the morning a travelling caravan had taken a pitch just outside my hedge; and its owner turned out to be an Oxford man, who, with his wife, was leading a vagabond life about the shires. He was an extremely well-read man, and we soon got on the best of terms, exchanging books and opinions, till he inspanned for pastures new a week later. The night before he left I was treated to another queer happening.
We had been talking and reading in my tiny sitting-room till about eleven o’clock, when my vagabond friend bade me a sleepy “Good night” and opened the front door. He had, however, only just put his foot on the cobbles when he stepped backwards with a sharp exclamation, and a scared look on his face.
“What’s up?” I asked.
“It’s awfully queer,” he replied; “I could have sworn I saw a face looking straight at me close to that bush”—he pointed to the privet hedge at the left of the door—“but there didn’t seem to be any body to it. I’m certainly not drunk, but I may have been dreaming.”
After my recent experience, which I had not thought it worth while to mention to such a hard-headed soul as my chance companion, I felt anything but comfortable. We were both rather ashamed of our brief lapse from common sense, and laughed the incident off as best we might.
The following day found me in all the doubtful glory of my solitude once more, and I must confess to having been thankful when an invitation reached me that same evening, from friends at Fambridge, for a few days’ fishing.
I have never suffered from that popular present-day malady known as “nerves,” possibly because of an open-air existence with plenty of exercise, but, though I had only been there a short time, the cottage and the locality now seemed to have become almost uncanny to me. Had I mixed more with the inhabitants, I should have discovered, as I did later, that this strange feeling was not without some foundation.